LEFT: A swan contemplates the post-industrial harbour, near Queens Quay West and Spadina AvenueRIGHT: A school in the heart of Scarborough
he city of toronto is stumbling toward the end of 2011 mired in a deep civic funk. Mayor Rob Ford, a renegade small-c conservative from the suburban ward of Etobicoke North, bulldozed his way to victory a year ago on a simplistic pledge to slash municipal waste. His mantra: “Stop the gravy train.” While he has yet to identify instances of reckless spending, he has ordered city officials to extract almost $800 million from Toronto’s $9-billion operating budget, the sixth-largest public purse in Canada. This punishing and potentially ruinous process may entail shuttering libraries, firing police officers, and scaling back everything from snow removal to grass cutting to transit. Municipal services — such as public housing, environmental advocacy, and even zoos — that don’t conform to the mayor’s narrow vision of local government may be eliminated, privatized, or significantly reduced.Toronto’s woes, however, go well beyond the mayor’s fiscal populism. The Greater Toronto Area — a 7,100-square-kilometre expanse of 5.5 million residents who live in a band of municipalities extending from Burlington to Oshawa to Newmarket — finds itself increasingly crippled by some of North America’s nastiest gridlock, congestion so bad it costs the region at least $6 billion a year in lost productivity. Sprawl, gridlock’s malign twin, continues virtually unchecked, consuming farmland, stressing commuters, and ratcheting up the cost of municipal services. Without reliable funding, transit agencies can barely afford to modernize, much less expand, straining the GTA’s roads and highways to the bursting point.
The GTA’s problems have a social dimension as well. With some of the country’s highest real estate prices — now more than $450,000 for an average single-family dwelling — affordable rentals remain scarce, while tens of thousands of families who earn as little as $20,000 a year languish on waiting lists for often-substandard subsidized housing. In Toronto’s so-called “inner suburbs” (the city proper consists of an older core dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, surrounded by a ring of “outer suburbs” built between 1945 and the early 1970s), poverty has become more prevalent and concentrated. And ethnic: while Toronto has more foreign-born residents than any metropolitan region in the world, many newcomers struggle to find decent work, even if they arrive bearing university degrees.
Not that there is nothing to recommend Canada’s largest city; on the contrary. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, Toronto was transformed from a joyless provincial backwater into an energetic, cosmopolitan capital and is now one of the world’s “alpha” cities. Its mixed economy emerged from the 2008 credit crisis and recession in good shape, sustaining hundreds of comfortable residential neighbourhoods, as well as dozens of thriving retail strips on older main streets such as Danforth Avenue, College Street, and Queen Street East. Crime rates remain relatively low (Statistics Canada ranks Toronto third lowest of Canada’s thirty-two census metropolitan areas on its 2010 crime severity index, well below Regina and Montreal, for example), while tolerance for immigrants, the poor, and a wide range of ethno-cultural groups runs high. Toronto is also an excellent place to be gay, get sick, eat out, go to school, work as an artist, see live theatre, attend film festivals, walk in a ravine, borrow library books, publish newspapers, launch indie bands, develop smart phone apps, conduct biomedical research, and raise capital for mining ventures. For these and other reasons, the GTA attracts 100,000 new residents every year.
But even as many of the world’s other megacities, including regional rivals like Boston and Chicago, prepare for an era of breakneck global urban expansion, Toronto persists in thinking small and acting cheap. Should the rest of Canada care? Yes, because the GTA is the country’s economic hub, accounting for one-fifth of its gross domestic product; New York, by contrast, produces just 3.3 percent of the United States’ national income. Canadian politicians typically refuse to acknowledge the importance to the country of its largest metropolis, opting instead to pander to provincial anti-Toronto sentiments. But tens of billions more in tax revenues flow out of the GTA than come back in the form of services and public sector investment, which means GTA wealth subsidizes government services across Canada, including health care and social security. So whether they love or loathe Toronto, all Canadians have a stake in its well-being. If Toronto fails, all Canadians will feel the pain.
Question: who’s in charge? Answer: no one
Jack DylanMap of the Greater Toronto AreaBut that was then. Today municipal government across the GTA is a cumbersome, expensive, balkanized embarrassment, the legacy of ill-considered decisions by successive Ontario governments. The problems began in the early 1970s, when Bill Davis’s Progressive Conservatives decided to impose the two-tier approach on the rural townships, a ring of suburbs now known as the 905, outside Metro’s borders. Andrew Sancton, an expert on municipal government at the University of Western Ontario, describes that decision as “the original mistake.” The result, unique in North America, is that Toronto is surrounded by a ring of large, powerful municipalities — Mississauga, Brampton, Oakville, Richmond Hill, Markham, Vaughan, and Ajax-Pickering — that compete with the city for private and public investment.
After 1976, when the provincial Parti Québécois came to power, Canada’s economic centre of gravity shifted west from Montreal, along Highway 401 toward Toronto, spurring waves of growth. By the end of the 1980s, the government of Ontario recognized that the region had morphed into a huge metropolitan area criss-crossed by increasingly irrelevant local boundaries. In 1994, NDP premier Bob Rae asked Anne Golden, then head of the United Way and now president and CEO of the Conference Board of Canada, to chair a task force to determine how best to manage growth across the GTA. Her team’s sage solution: eliminate Metro and the other 905 regional municipalities in favour of a single Greater Toronto Council, with a mandate to plan and oversee such services as transportation, waste management, and economic development. The task force also recommended preserving the larger, lower-tier municipalities (for example, Toronto, Mississauga, and Oshawa), so they could continue offering residents access to local services like parks and planning. In effect, Golden was telling the province to reinvent Metro, but on a much broader canvas.
Conservative premier Mike Harris, elected in 1995 to reduce government via his Common Sense Revolution, ignored the Golden task force, choosing instead to amalgamate Metro and its local municipalities while leaving intact the 905 two-tier governments established in 1973. Although Harris claimed his reforms would facilitate more streamlined decision-making, the result has been anything but. Thirteen years after amalgamation, many Torontonians feel increasingly alienated from a giant municipal bureaucracy that favours one-size-fits-all solutions.
The city’s forty-five-member council is riven by chronic factionalism that pits the older central city against the postwar suburbs. Council meetings go on for days and often become mired in tortured arguments about issues as inconsequential as councillors’ office expenses. And so strong is the incumbency advantage that many councillors remain in office long after their best-before dates.
Despite Harris’s ambition to reduce government, the GTA remains staggeringly over-governed, with 244 municipal office holders, including twenty-five mayors. By comparison, New York, with 8.3 million residents, is governed by fifty-one councillors, five borough presidents, and just one term-limited mayor. Yet the GTA has no democratically elected regional council with a mandate to focus on wider issues, such as economic development and transportation planning. The Ontario government has been reluctant to establish such a body, for fear of creating a powerful political rival or being accused of giving the GTA preferential treatment. So while regional governments oversee vast metropolitan areas in Berlin, São Paulo, and Greater Vancouver, the government of Ontario has yet to learn a crucial lesson in urban expansion: when cities spill over their existing borders, managing growth becomes more vital than ever.
